dot-font: Seven Principles of Typographic Contrast

In a seminal booklet that he both designed and wrote, Carl Dair showed how in
typography, as in music, harmony and contrast are the keys to composition.
By John D. Berry, creativepro.com contributing editor
(creativepro.com) http://www.creativepro.com/story/feature/19877.html
The late Canadian typographer Carl Dair was one of the great typographic
designers of the 1950s and 1960s, and he may have been the best of them all
at explaining the nature of typography. In coordinated projects that he both
wrote and designed, he managed to describe -- and show -- the ways in which
manipulating and using type make typography happen.
Dair is the very epitome of what I mean when I say typographer: someone
who designs with type, not just a fancy typesetter, but someone who uses
type, in all its variations, as the principle element of design. Since type car-
ries meaning, the practice of typography requires a designer who cares about
the words themselves. It requires someone who cares enough, and is skillful
enough, to make the type express that meaning, rather than serve as simply
eye-catching decoration.
Carl Dairs book Design With Type (originally published in 1952; revised
and expanded in 1967) is deservedly still in print, even though the technol-
ogy that he used and described has long been outdated. The practicalities of
setting type in metal are no longer the practicalities we have to deal with; but
the visual relationships between letters, which Dair showed and explained so
graphically in his book, havent changed at all. Design With Type is still
one of the best handbooks available for learning how to do exactly what the
title says: design with type.
At around the same time he was revising his book, Carl Dair was producing a
series of six pamphlets for West Virginia Pulp & Paper (Westvaco), which he
called A Typographic Quest. Each booklet was, naturally, printed on West-
vaco paper stock; like the lavish paper-company samples produced today,
this series was meant to raise the profle of the manufacturer and encourage
designers to think of Westvaco when specifying paper for their printing jobs.
But these were quite modest productions: little saddlestitched booklets of
about 30 pages, measuring 5-1/4 inches by 9, usually printed in two colors
(the frst one uses three colors throughout; the later ones are two-color, al-
though the second color may change from sheet to sheet, with all three colors
used together on the covers). The frst Typographic Quest was published in
1964; the sixth (and, as far as I know, fnal) came out in 1968, the year Carl
Dair died. Since he was both writer and designer for the series, each of the
booklets emerged as a wholly crafted object, dedicated to explaining one or
another aspect of using type.
Harmony & Contrast
The heart of Carl Dairs teaching -- the thing that I keep pointing people to,
and the most valuable thing I myself learned from his work -- is the subject
of A Typographic Quest No. 5: Typographic Contrast. In a virtuoso
performance, Dair shows exactly how designers use different kinds of visual
contrast to make design work and meaning pop out -- clearly and unambigu-
ously, and with fair. To make his point, he compares typography to music.
Graphic form and musical form have a common denominator: rhythm and
emphasis, harmony and contrast. Harmony and contrast, says Dair, are
fundamental to both, and the discovery of these basic principles and their
application to the design of printed matter is the object of this volume of A
Typographic Quest.
Seven Kinds of Contrast
Dair frst explains the elements of harmony (a consistent relationship
between the black strokes of the letters on a page and the space around them;
and any rules, frames, or decorations being similar in style to the type), then
goes on to show seven different kinds of contrast. He emphasizes that in any
kind of differentiation, its important to make the contrast obvious -- not just
a slight change, an almost imperceptible variation, but a really big, obvious
difference between the contrasting elements.
The frst and most basic contrast is size. A simple but dramatic contrast of
size, says Dair, provides a point to which the readers attention is drawn.
Set in the same style of type, it maintains the exact relationship of the let-
ter to the background. It is only a physical enlargement of the basic pattern
created by the form and the weight of the type being used for the text. The
most common use of size is in making the title or heading noticeably bigger
than the text -- but thats only a starting-point.
The second most obvious contrast is of weight: bold type stands out in
the middle of lighter type of the same style. As Dair points out, Not only
types of varying weight, but other typographic material such as rules, spots,
squares, etc., can be called into service to provide a heavy area for a powerful
point of visual attraction or emphasis.
The next two kinds of contrast are the contrast of form and the contrast of
structure. Its not entirely obvious where to draw a line between these two,
since they both have to do with the shapes of the letters.
By form, Dair means the distinction between a capital letter and its low-
ercase equivalent, or a roman letter and its italic variant. He includes con-
densed and expanded versions under form, and he even allows as how
there are some script types which harmonize with standard types, such as
the Bank Script and Bodoni on the opposite page, and can be used for dra-
matic change of form. (He warns, parenthetically, against using scripts and
italics together, since they are both versions of handwritten letters; theyre
more likely to confict than to contrast.)
By structure, Dair means the different letterforms of different kinds of
typefaces -- a monoline sans serif vs. a high-contrast modern, for instance, or
an italic vs. a blackletter. The use of contrast of structure may be compared
to an orator who changes his voice not to increase or decrease the volume,
but to change the very quality of his voice to suit his words.
Put all these things together, and apply them to a block of text on a page,
and you come to the contrast of texture: the way the lines of type look as a
mass, which depends partly on the letterforms themselves and partly on how
theyre arranged. Like threads in cloth, says Dair, types form the fabric of
our daily communication.
Dairs sixth contrast is color -- and he warns that a second color is usually
less emphatic than plain black on white (or white on black), so its important
to give careful thought to which element needs to be emphasized, and to pay
attention to the tonal values of the colors used.
The last of Dairs seven kinds of contrast is the contrast of direction: the op-
position between vertical and horizontal, and the angles in between. Turning
one word on its side can have a dramatic effect on a layout. But Dair points
out that text blocks also have their vertical or horizontal aspects, and mixing
wide blocks of long lines with tall columns of short lines can also produce a
contrast.
Other Types of Contrast
There are other kinds of contrast, less clearly dependent on the type itself.
Dair mentions contrast by isolation, i.e., putting a word or phrase in an
isolated position away from the other elements on the page, to make it stand
out. (I think of this as a contrast of position.) And he suggests other kinds
of non-typographic contrast, such as mixing paper stocks, embossing, and
using contrasting matte or gloss inks. He also points out that illustrations,
especially line art, may be in harmony with the type on the same page or may
contrast with it completely.
Finally, Dair takes time to say a little about rhythm (in typography, it
consists of intervals of space) and about the power of interrupted rhythm
(the impact derives not from the fact that the unexpected happens, but rather
that the expected does not happen).
Most of the time, we use more than one kind of contrast together, in order to
make the differences between visual elements even more obvious. We can
use all of Dairs seven kinds of contrast at once, if were skillful; he refers
to this as typographic chords. (One of the chapter titles in Design With
Type is Multiplying the Contrasts.) But breaking them down like this into
simple oppositions makes it easier to use them consciously; it keeps us from
getting our layouts all muddied up through trying to change too many things
at once without thinking about what were doing. Ive found Carl Dairs
analysis of typographic contrast -- and especially the visual fair with which
he presents it -- an invaluable tool in the practice of graphic design.